Scents and Sensibility

Rosemary is the herb of remembrance, and it isn’t just Shakespeare who says so. Its powerful aroma inspired ancient Greek students to weave garlands of it through their hair to help them remember their lessons. Medieval people thought that rosemary’s pungent fragrance could fumigate the air and keep them safe from the plague. Even now, cognitive aromatherapy believes that inhaling rosemary’s bracing scent provides a wake-up jolt to the brain, increasing alertness and mental function.

These days, I can’t testify to how that works. I lost my sense of smell to a virus a little over a year ago, and it’s taking its good old time coming back.

The complete loss of smell is called anosmia. Experiencing that proved just how much I’d taken my sense of smell for granted. I missed sniffing (most) ambient aromas in the air and learned to hate recipes that said things like “Sauté garlic over low heat until fragrant.” Despite a book-knowledge understanding that smell and taste were besties, I never expected that a lack of smell would completely hijack my sense of taste. But, for a while, I tasted nothing. (I know this for a fact, because I kept trying.)

Soon, anosmia shifted into parosmia, which is the distortion of smell. While parosmia is considered a sign that the nose and brain are trying to reconnect, it also brings its own “delights.” Neurons in the nose mis-wire, making once-pleasant aromas smell like garbage or chemicals. Coffee, my life source, smelled putrid. The perfume I’d worn for decades became intolerable. Sometimes, I caught unpleasant whiffs even when there wasn’t anything in the air to smell. Parosmia also affects taste. For me, everything tasted the way Ti-D-Bol smells…even chocolate, which seemed particularly cruel.

Enter Olfactory Rehab, currently the only solution medicine has to help a person regain their sense of smell. Olfactory Rehab (that’s “smell training” to most of us) involves sniffing potent essential oils to help the brain remember how to smell. My smell-training kit uses lemon (fruity), clove (spicy), eucalyptus (aromatic), and rose (flowering), a broad spectrum of scents representing different olfactory receptors in the nose. The idea is to sniff these scents twice a day to help stimulate the brain’s smell-memory. Recording how each scent smells each time tracks your progress.

This was never fated to work for me. I’m too skeptical, and I always have way too many questions. What if my memory of the smell is wrong and I retrain my brain incorrectly? If retraining the brain is all about remembering scents, why wouldn’t casually sniffing the real-life scents in my life – like coffee and herbs – accomplish the same results? Worse … what if smell training is like yoga for me, and I just can’t take it seriously enough?

I don’t know if smell training works, because I never used it correctly. (It turns out it was like yoga, and I couldn’t stop laughing at the vision of myself doing it.)

Time seems to be on my side. Coffee still doesn’t smell quite like I remember, but the aroma that greets me in the morning is pleasant enough, and the taste grows more familiar every day. Chocolate is improving. I’m still surprised by what I can and can’t smell or taste correctly. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I don’t know why some kinds of apples taste fine and other kinds taste like soap. And why can’t I smell something as pungent as a fire in a firepit yet totally pick up the scent of my favorite frankincense incense?

Rosemary still doesn’t smell like the heady scent I remember. It’s tinny and medicinal, more annoying than invigorating. But we’re moving along.

Someday, I may even smell cookies baking again.